Chernobyl

Or: An Ill Wind

A spring night and a passel of neighbors are out on the railroad bridge, watching the sky. They tuck themselves into coats, children chase each other about, a baby is cuddled and kissed. “What do you think makes the colors?” One asks, “Certainly it’s the fuel,” another opines. But the camera knows better. It flits with a eyries lowness, watching the wind tease at a woman’s hair, like an invisible finger curling a strand around it. We see flecks of ash light innocently on hands and cheeks, falls in a soft rain around the children. And beyond that, we watch a blue tower of light shoot skywards from the ruptured 4th reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Thus we find ourselves into HBO’s drama, pieced together form the memories of the city of Pripyat, Ukraine, about the worst nuclear disaster ever. Those souls on the bridge and thousands of others will soon fall under an eldritch curse: burns, lesions, bleeding, death. From the control room under Chief Engineer and the Soviet Union’s worst possible boss Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) to the trials of Ludmylla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckly) who’s firefighter husband (Adam Nagaitas) is a first responder to the catastrophe, we watch the seeds of radiation, and equally invisible and insidious, the lies and coverups of the totalitarian state, sprout and tear part, lives, communities, and nations.

Principally though, we follow the bleakest buddy cop movie ever: Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) a nebbish nuclear physicist brought on to advise on a potentially politically tricky situation and ends up coordinating the reels effort of a burgeoning nightmare. He’s paired by the dyspeptic apparatchik Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard). They fight crime. Or rather they combat radiation, trying to keep the exposed core from spewing irradiated smoke, poisoning the ground water, or wiping out half of the USSR in a violent explosion. Valery has his work cut for him trying to cage an all-powerful force, while Boris tries to steer his once irritant now ally away from cutting his own throat on the narrow glass knives of the KGB. After all, there may be apocalypse looming but the good name of the party must come foremost.

They’re joined by a living superego. Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is a composite character standing in for the team of scientists who worked with Legasov to contain the danger and spread the truth about what happened at Chernobyl. The legion suit of good science shows its seams, but Watson is so capable that she manages to etch dents and dints of personality, as when she cooly uses coded small talk with a colleague to track Legasov’s progress, or her deflation when collared by the KGB, neither fear nor anger but pure incomprehension. The series pulls none of its punches in its comparisons with climate change. Scientists working for the public good are belittled by those with power, their warnings are disregarded, precautions are not followed, the only difference being that it is pride, rather than profit, that drives the engines of doom.

The series starts out strong but suffers a bit of mission creep in later episodes, trying to gather all aspects of the disaster to it (though we get touching performances by Alex Ferns as Glukov, head of the mining crews sent to contain the site or the eternal exasperation of David Dencik as Gorbachev.) But the core story, the invisible killer that stalks the sky and fans the people cold, slides into scenes unexpectedly suddenly crystallizing a shot with menace, like the invisible finger twirling through the hair of the men and women on the bridge. A soldier looks at a tear in his boot, a nurse discovers a burn on her hand, and we know that all is up with them. The music, taken and tuned from active power plants, reminds me of one of my favorite lines about the disaster, from the novel Wolves Eat Dogs, “What kind of leitmotif for this ominous beast. An ominous cello. One note. Sustained. For fifty thousand years.”

The weight of it lands primarily between Harris’s shoulders as he plugs along against the malevolent reactor and the knowledge that his government could let something like it happen again. The series takes pains not to paint Legasov as a hero, later on his sins as a party man are read back to him, yet we are unaware that we are seeing him take steps into a poisoned atmosphere as he sent others; to do the right thing. The driving mystery of the film, how does a RKBM reactor explode, might well be how does a timid soul find strength.